So there is this Korean mobile app puzzle game called anipang by SundayToZ  (punny, I KNOW!) that all the Koreans are apparently playing. I see it on the bus, I see it on the train, I see it at home (and yes, I play a little myself). The viral part is how it’s tied into the KaKao Talk social networking platform, you can announce your scores and have leaderboards with your friends and send free plays to your friends (each play requires a token called a heart). Think of it like Farmville and how you could use Facebook to send free gifts to your friends and how your friends were constantly having farmville updates. The game part is that it’s essentially a cuter bejeweled clone, only with exploding animals.

The thing it, it’s all in Korean. The instructions on how to play show up on the initial sign up screen, and then NEVER SHOW UP AGAIN. EVER. And if you do a Google search, you will find there are no English language directions ANYWHERE. It hardly even registers in google at all. There’s youtube videos, 2 tech articles about how it’s exploded in growth in the Korean market, and a expat(?) blog discussing how weird it is that ex-boyfriend’s current girlfriends are sending her hearts in the hopes of getting a free heart back (this is the whoring yourself out on social media for free hearts I was talking about). THAT’S IT.

So, as a public service for all the people that did not follow my sage advice (DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANIPANG!) and who don’t speak Korean, here’s what I know so far.

The basic gameplay is similar to bejeweled. You get a 7×7 board of different animal faces (pig, monkey, cat, chick (baby chicken), mouse, and dog). Your goal is to line up either 3, 4, or 5 of the same animal in a row, which will cause them to pop out of existence. Remaining animals drop down to fill in the spaces from the top, with new random animals filling in the gaps. You can swap 2 animals up and down or left and right, but only one pair at a time, and if you don’t get a 3, 4,or 5 lineup match, then the swap goes back to the original. Your goal is to pop as many animals as possible in 60 seconds to rack up a high score. It sounds more complicated then it is. Basic gameplay is pretty easy.

What’s not so easy is the bonus stuff.

If you pop 4, only 3 disappear and the 4th remaining animal gets big cute eyes. If you line it up into another 3 and pop it, it’ll also pop out all 8 animals around it.

If you pop 5, 4 will disappear and the remaining 5th will be a ghost. If you double click it, all the animals of the same (?) type on the board will pop.

If you pop a basic 3, and then pop a basic 3 immediately afterwards (within 1 second) you get a combo bonus. The more combos you get (it will actually flash on the top, Combo 1, Combo2, etc) the higher the bonus for each added pop. For example, if you pop 3 it’s 10 points. If you pop 3 after 2 seconds, another 10 points.  Pop 3 2 second later, it’s another 10 points. 30 total points. But if you pop 3, pop3 1 second later, pop3 1 second after that; you’ve got a 3 Combo and with bonus points you’re looking at 60 total points. (these point totals are totally made up, I haven’t yet figured out what the real point or bonus values are). All I know for sure is that if you are slow and don’t do many combos, you’re looking at average scores of 40,000 points. If you can build up a 20 combo, that’s like 150,000 points by itself.

If you get like a 5 combo, the screen starts flashing. When that happens, if you line up and pop 3 (or more), then it’ll also pop the surrounding animals too. So instead of 3 popping, it’ll be like 12. And as new animals drop in, they may naturally line up 3, and then pop another 12 (plus it’s immediate, so it’s counted as a combo). It can lead to an epileptic fit if you’re lucky.

After a certain combo or time limit, you get a bomb. If you hit the bomb, then all the animals in that column pop, plus the entire bottom row. Hitting the bomb can help if you can’t immediately find a 3 to line up and pop. Plus, during the bomb animation, I think the clock pauses.

You can give away hearts for free once an hour. You get a free heart from friends or if you wait 8 minutes. Every time you level up, you get a jewel and free hearts. Jewels can be exchanged for more hearts. Jewels can be bought with a credit card.

Supposedly you can hack the android version to get extra time, so I only trust the ios scores, but some people just get scary high scores. Mostly the kids.

That’s it for now, feel free to add any more tips in the comments.

Which leads to the first bit of confusion that I wasn’t aware of. The license is just official permission to get married. You need the license to get married, but the license itself doesn’t mean you are married. It just means you’re ready to get married. The mariage itself is when the official and the witnesses sign off on that piece of paper.

The scond thing that I learned, which is a recent change since I last really read the website directions not that long ago (maybe back in february), is that there are no more paper forms. You prefill your info on the website, and then you come in with your confirmation number and they finish the processing with both parties present in person. But what if you don’t have a computer or forgot to submit an online application? Well, they have kiosks there with computers preset to go to the online application where fill in your info, and then you get your confirmation number right there and then.

Another thing people don’t tell you is that this must be the only other office, besides the downtown DMV, where the people really are friendly and helpful, and the lines are not that long and goes quite fast. It was pretty busy for a 3pm on Wednesday, but all in all the wait was very reasonable and the couches (yes, couches, not wooden or steel benches!) were fairly comfortable.

The flowers and wedding regalia they have there might seem steep to some ($25 for a boquet), but when you compare it to a full wedding ($500 is a low average for nyc), it’s a steal. A STEAL! And they have 6 options to choose from. The boutonirs for men are even more reasonable (less then $10 for each). $35 for flowers is nothing compared to the cost or outfitting a church and reception hall. It’s also the same cost as the marriage license. People who complain about such matters on Yelp! are penny wise and pound foolish.

But the most important thing I learned is that it really is all about the marriage, not about the fancy pants hall and photos and dj and favors. I saw so many couples, old and young, rich and poor, old fashioned and hip, lots of different ethnicities and languages, and everyone was just happy as giggles to be getting married. Some brides could not stop laughing. Some families would not stop taking photos. Some couples would not stop asking strangers to take photos for them. Everyone was just happy to be getting married. Maybe they could be more relaxed because they didn’t have to plan anything elaborate (although a lot of wedding parties came in all dresed to the nines, a few in ethnic costume), but they were pretty happy. The whole place was pretty happy. I wouldn’t mind being married in such a place filled with so many happy couples. If I had to plan everything all over again, I’d consider it much more seriously then I did the first time around. If you’re feeling a bit down, I recommend stopping on by and sitting down and just enjoy the atmosphere, it’s a pretty happy place in general.

After work, the girl and I go to Crate & Barrel to register up, because we’re an aspirational couple that isn’t afraid to let the world know that we are the kind of people who imagine that one day we’ll host a fancy pants dinner party where our guests will be eating smart and stylish food from modernist wave rimmed white bowls, instead of the much more likely sang-gyop-sal party featuring burning pork fat mixed with plastic plates and paper towel napkins sopping up puddles left by the dripping wet lettuce baskets. That is, if we’re not too busy mopping up bits of creamed carrots that the baby has thrown against the floor and table and ceiling (why always the ceiling?!), mopping it up with our bleach stained shirts. But a couple on the verge of an expensive wedding can dream, and we dream of Crate & Barrel (because we’re not one of THOSE couples that register at Williams Sonoma and their $87 pepper mills).

There’s only one person manning the gift registry counter, which is not all that unusual, and they’re helping some other couple, which is cool. So we have a seat, and chat, and wait. And wait. And wait a little more. Apparently it wasn’t clear to anyone that we were waiting to register up, and the helpful security guard went ahead and got us some help, so props to him. I guess in hindsight I should have interrupted the prior couple and made it abundantly clear that I was also waiting, like a self centered jerk. Because being nice and polite just gets you ignored in this town. I forgot that fact. Whatevs.

So the lady walks us through the procedure, gets us a scanner, notes that the store is closing in the next 15 minutes, and we’re off to the races. And race we do. Because we wasted about 15 minutes waiting, like chumps, so there’s not much time to actually shop. None of the employees were rushing us along, which I thought was nice, but now I realize they were totally ignoring us, which will turn out to be disastrous in just a few minutes. Obviously there’s not enough time, so we scan up a few items and then head back to the kiosk to load them up and at least get the registry started so we can modify it at home or come back to the store.

We plug in, download, and walk through 10 page of setup on the kiosk, when someone decides to power cycle the entire rear of the store, turning off all the kiosks at once. Nobody bothered to check if anyone was using the rear kiosks, because they were too busy ignoring customers. All of the scanned items? Gone. Registry setup? Gone (because we hadn’t advanced far enough to get to the part where we save the registry). Past 40 minutes of our lives? Gone.  IT”S ALL GONE.

So thank you, Crate & Barrel store #46, for completely wasting our time. COMPLETELY WASTING OUR TIME. If it was up to me, we’d take our aspirational window shopping someplace else (not Williams Sonoma, heaven forbid). Count yourself lucky that the girl likes your wares and that IKEA doesn’t have a wedding registry. *shakes fist*

But then we got to thinking, if we have to get flowers for the reception, why not go with the vendor for the church. Probably the church is getting a discount, why not repay that kindness by using them as our florist. So we asked a second time who the florist is, and oddly enough we were told that it’s not something we have to worry about. The lady in charge of flowers for the church was a bit reluctant or ignorant as to whom the florist was.

Oddly enough, some old lady overheard our conversation, and literally dragged us away (for a small lady with a cane, she was suprisingly strong) to talk with some other ladies (manning the book store), and we managed to get the florists’ business card. If it wasn’t the for the old lady, we would have had no idea who the florist is, and probably would have given up at that point.

As it turns out, the summer months are usually flower-less, so we’re going to have to buy flowers for the church anyway (fudge!). But the initial quote is coming within range of our budget (embarrassingly, I had no idea what our budget for flowers was when we were meeting with the florist) so that’s good so far. Since we haven’t actually taken delivery (or given a deposit), I can’t yet recommend them, but if it’s good enough for a church with 4 sunday masses …

Casa Flora
47-44 Bell Blvd
Bayside, NY 11361
(718)224-1719
http://www.casaflorany.com/

(The possibly real backstory is that their Gateway intermediary to the T-Mobile network dropped them. Either early, or maybe late, or maybe without notice, but it meant that all those sim chips and all those IMEIs in the handheld devices were permanently turned off. The solution was to swap out the entire user base with new sim cards, and then reflash the devices with upgraded firmware with the new IMEIs. Overnight. Without notice. This part I was not actually upset about. The peek service was a backup, not mission critical. The part I got mad about was the fact that I read about it in Engadget a few weeks after the fact, never got the supposed emails that went out explaining everything and offering to fix things, and they billed me for 5 months after I requested they cancel my service.)

The part where Peek told their entire user base to fuck themselves was the bait and switch, where the CEO/President made public statements that all the hardware would be replaced FOR FREE. That was the bait part, and it worked like a charm, garnering lots of good press for a catastrophic event. The switch came a few days later, after all the tech blogs moved onto the next story, where the free part was replaced by $1 plus $6.95 shipping and handling, the so-called Lemonade Offer (because when a company tells you to go fuck yourself, you pay the company $8 to give you powdered drink mix lemonade). Of course, people were not happy about any of this, and many people just simply canceled at that point. I did, because if I want to deal with a mobile company that’s actively trying to screw me over, I already have a cell phone plan for that, thankyouverymuch.

So what do you do when you’re a company busy screwing your customers, losing customers, and generally circling the drain? You make a desperate sale offer for some easy upfront cash and worry about the future later.

And the future looks kinda bleak. Smartphones do everything the Peek does, but better and faster. Feature phones are cheap, but now have mobile web. Peek + cheap phone plan = same cost as regular phone plan on basic model smartphone (with the added benefit of having 2 heavy bulky hardware items to carry around instead of just 1). And you have no subscribers, except the ones that gave you all the money upfront which you’ve since spent and are now obligated to provide a service with no additional income. If you’re Peek, you’re screwed because YOU HAVE NO FUTURE. If only you had launched your product a few years earlier … except that someone did and it was called  Research In Motion.

So you change the business plan entirely, you get out of the hardware business, you get out of the retail business, you repurpose your tech to serve as an enterprise vendor for carriers who want to add rich communication services to their cheap feature phones. (This is actually a good plan, btw). But what to do with your old customers? You remember them, the guys that stuck by you in your darkest hour, your most loyal fans, the ones that gave you enough cash to survive long enough for this crazy new plan to actually hatch and maybe work? If you’re Amol Sarva and your company is named Peek, YOU TELL THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES AGAIN (maybe they didn’t get the memo back in Nov 2010).

Now, let me be clear, the old business model doesn’t work anymore, these customers were losing their “lifetime” service. My objection is to how Peek treats it’s clients. The fact of the matter is that the  Lifetime offer was a desperate immediate cash grab now in exchange for a very uncertain future. But it was marketed as Lifetime, not Unlimited. Lifetime implies that you’ll be providing this service for a long time, Unlimited no limits for now, but makes no statement about the future. Unlimited is a more honest description. Secondly, Peek didn’t shut down, it didn’t go bankrupt. Bankruptcy is something people understand and can deal with. “Oh well, that offer did seem too good to be true, Amol’s comments about how it was untenable were right, the company went broke. Too bad.” Reform the assets and the tech around a new company, fire and rehire the talent, and move forward. Peek was a good idea that just couldn’t compete, but out of the ashes, CloudQuickster was born! (Wait, that name might have already been used by another company that just told  all it’s customers to go screw themselves.) INSTEAD, Peek raised another round of funding, and then told all their most loyal and die hard customers that we were quite surprised so many of your were so  stupid to have actually still been using our obviously terrible and money losing service. We’re turning off the lights, giving away the terrible hardware (so long as you pay for your own shipping), and doing something else for someone else and we don’t need or care about you any longer. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. Thanks for the cash, suckers, and FUCK YOU. (The Fuck You refers to the fact that people got email telling them of the service shutdown a day after the service actually shut down.)

tl;dr, I KNOW.

Here’s the short version: Peek is a company that specializes in innovative communication solutions and is TERRIBLE at communicating to their paying customers. Peek will take your money and then leave you hanging high and dry, all while laughing at you during interviews afterwards. Peek is unreliable. Peek has completely and permanently canceled service to EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR CUSTOMERS … TWICE … IN TWO YEARS (Nov 2010, Jan 2012).

DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH PEEK. EVER!

I have finally found the answer, my friend, and it is the Global New Beginnings Inc DV136Z8 Digital Video Camera, better known as the free camcorder Staples gives you if you buy $85 of stuff from their website and are a registered user with Staples.

But first, let’s talk specs. According to the fun stickers affixed on the brandless body, it’s got a 3.1 megapixel camera, 4x digital zoom, and it records digital movies (in avi format). Resolution maxes out at 640×480 and 30fps. There is custom white balance options> the camera mode upshoots to 2048×1536 resolution. There is a pair of LED lights for low light shooting, although it only illuminates up to 12 inches in front of the camera. There is a normal and a macro mode, although it seems to be stuck on macro mode all the time. SD memory card slot at the bottom, AV and usb ports, with included cables, software, and a manual that actually makes sense and is easy to read. In English! This last one is a biggie, as my $1500 Nikon camera could not accomplish such a simple task.

As this is now my THIRD time writing this part of the post (That would be a FAIL wordpress, FAIL!) I will skip the 3 paragraphs of exposition to break it down quick. It’s OK for 2002 technology, but your smartphone will do it better. Plus, it eats batteries for lunch. I tried to record a 30 second clip, but it kept draining out the batteries (fresh new alkelines, recharged NiMH, didn’t matter) so fast that all I could manage were two 7 second clips. That’s right, it craps out after SEVEN SECONDS OF RECORDING. Oh, and the pictures it takes aren’t much better:

Also, night recording is crappy and features a lot of hot pixels. And not to beat a dead horse, but there’s no direct AC input either, so you are hostage to its battery eating demands.

If you ever get one of these, don’t bother opening the box, send it straight to landfill. That is all.

I prefer to waste my time watching football instead. Unless I watch the Jets, it’s usually a lot less frustrating.

That might seem like an exaggeration, but just look at the numbers. Pre-iPad, the tablet market, if you could call it that, was a moribund graveyard of expensive laptops jimmied up with a clunkier version of Windows (nobody thought that possible, but hey, they did it anyway) and a pricetag that could buy you a pair of netbooks and then some. Post iPad, well, all that’s pretty much sold well has been the iPad. And then the best selling tablet of all time came out, the iPad 2. What’s the current market share? 85%? So I don’t think I am going that far out on a limb when I say a tablet is an iPad.

And the manufacturers agree, they’ve all been gunning at the same specs. Galaxy Tab, Playbook, HP Touchpad, etc. Nearly equivalent specs, nearly equivalent price, nowhere near the same success. Which makes perfect sense. Can’t compete on price, those parts are expensive. Can’t compete on OS, Apple has been developing iOS for several years now (and as RIMM and Palm/HP/Android have discovered, making a tablet os is hards, yo). And can’t compete on ecosystem, there’s an app for that, but it’s on iOS.

What are you going to do, make marginally better hardware for a higher price and try to top the luxury brand and category leader? After a certain price point, all you’re selling is an ultraportable laptop, and oh yeah, Apple owns that category too.
The key, therefore, is not to make a tablet.

The smartphone market is already kinda crowded, and if it weren’t for carriers desperate to grab subscribers and lower their churn rate, it’d be a pretty pricey market too. Thanks to carrier subsidies, prices hover around the $0 to $200 level, so they’re oddly considered “cheaper” then tablets. But that’s just the subsidy distorting the hardware market. Why not subsidize a $700 smartphone by $500 when you’re signing up suckers to a 2 year commitment of $2400, and that’s assuming they never go over their data/sms/minute/roaming caps. Thanks to fat profit margins, the market’s already got plenty of players.
What’s still wide open then? Why, the not a phone / not a tablet market, of course!

Wha?

You heard me.

Not a phone, not a tablet. But something that maybe plays some movies, maybe some music, Angry Birds (of course), and some basic web surfing. Not as pricey as a smartphone or a tablet, so the profit’s not there either. But that’s OK, because if there’s no fat margin to be had, Apple’s not interested, and that means the market is wide open.

And that’s right where Amazon has put itself with the Kindle Fire. It’s got a color screen, you can watch movies, you can surf the interwebs, and you can play Angry Birds. It’s also where the Nook color is, the Kobo is, and where a dozen other android faux-tablets are at. It’s also where the iPod touch is at, and that, btw, is the real competition for the Kindle Fire. But more on that in a second.

The sure sign that the market is open is that there’s no standard, no category defining product. Is it 10″ tablet lites? Is it 5″ iPod Touch-ish personal media players? Is it 7″ hybrids? Is it about being portable? Is it about staying at home? Is it a netbook, briefly creating a new category before being cannibalized by subsidized smartphones on the low end, and iPads on the top end?

Who knows, but it’s a category searching for answers and consolidation. Amazon Fire makes a very strong case for defining the category. Amazon can loss lead the hardware for back end software sales. But Apple’s Q3 revenue numbers belies how hard that is. App store and iTunes combined don’t rival any one of the hardware sales units, and that’s with the category leading online music store and category leading app store ecosystem. To cut costs, fancy tablet features had to go, including the cameras, the 3G, the processing power (it’s no slouch, but why do you think there’s a middle layer of Amazon could services between the Kindle Fire and the internet at large).

Apple too seems to be struggling with their entry. iPod touch packs much more raw processing horsepower and front and rear cameras, but at the expense of puny memory and smaller form function. Most disappointingly, the latest hardware upgrade involves no upgrade. Up the memory on the entry level iPod Touch to come close to matching the Kindle Fire, at the smae price point, and you have a very compelling product. But besides a big price drop, no major changes, which suggests Apple is struggling to hold onto profitability without ceding the category to budget players like Amazon.

And that’s where I find myself longing for an HP Touchpad. The ebay price for the hardware is $250, a little on the high end, but what you get is the best of both worlds. Hardware and camera that are competative, and a third choice in software that’s not as locked down as iOS, but still friendly enough for mom, unlike GingerHoneySandwich 7.2.13b. The only problem, of course, is that HP never sold them at that price, doesn’t make any more, and may or may not support webOS going forward while HP crubles apart, Yahoo style.

It’ll be interesting to see where the market takes us a year from now in the not a tablet / not a smartphone category.

Run. Now. As fast as you can. Don’t look back. Just RUN.

All that anger, smug superiority, and contemptuous vitriol. One day that shit is going to land on you. And then it will. not. stop.

RUN.

(a little backstory: I was sleeping on my normal morning commute, when all of a sudden I felt someone brushing up against my knee, and it was this young kinda punk chick in a pink top doing the usual subway bum rush to get the seat next to me. I was a bit annoyed that she was giving the bum rush to a lady with two kids and a strolled with a third, all while brushing my knee, and without so much as an “excuse me”, but whatever. And then, she goes all ballistic. She’s yelling at this lady next to her. She’s threatening to punch this lady, there is all this racist bile coming out about Chinese people, and I haven’t heard this many F-bomb drops since .. well, ever. Seriously, Sailors and cops don’t curse this much. From what I can gather, after grabbing the seat next to me, pink chick tried to save the seat next to her by putting her purse on the seat, only to have some Chinese lady push it aside and sit down. keep in mind that the boyfriend is OK with standing, and says as much nine times over. And it’s not like pink chick was so concerned about her boyfriend sitting that she ever once volunteers to give her boyfriend her seat. Oh, and for someone cursing up a storm for 20 minutes non-stop about how rude all Chinese people are, did I mention that neither I nor lady with 2 kids and a stroller got even a token “excuse me” as she bum rushed the empty seat? And finally, putting your purse or your bag down means shit. Seats are for people, not packages. I see the Chinese people do it all the time, rush the train and then throw their bags down next to them for their friends. And I hear the same white people like you complain about how totally rude that is. And it is. Bags mean nothing, the only thing “saving” a seat is someone’s ass in it. You don’t like it, too bad, we’re all tired and you can shove it.
But my point isn’t a commentary about subway etiquette, it’s about the need to avoid perpetually angry people. I’ll bet if the situation were reversed, and the Chinese lady put her purse down on the seat, pink chick would have pushed the purse aside and then spent the entire train ride cursing up the same storm about how rude Chinese people are, trying to steal “her” seat. Pink chick is bottled fury, self-centered entitlement fulfilled, rude and vindictive towards all that she holds in contempt, and that includes all her friends (based on the few parts of her conversation that were not about the seat). One day boyfriend is going to do something she perceives as “wrong”, and then he’s never going to hear the end of that shit until he’s dead. And maybe a few more years after that too.)

Supposedly the city needed, NEEDED, King Bloomberg to serve a third term for his administrative expertise that only he could bring. So far, a drunk monkey could do a better job (at least a drunk monkey doesn’t pretend that everything is OK). Not plow streets? Pretend that Brooklyn and Queens don’t exist? We needed a third term for this? Where is the value add that required a change to the city charter, a special one time only third term, and a few hundred million dollar ad campaign. At least a new mayor would give a damn because a second term might be in jeopardy. But not King Bloomie.

I guess what I am trying to say is: Do us a favor, actually screw that, do your fucking JOB, and send a god damned plow to Brooklyn instead of re-plowing the same cleared Upper East Side streets. Some of us have to get to work where we’re expected to actually do something, unlike being Mayor of New York where you can conveniently ignore 2+ million people. I mean, so long as tourists are getting to see Broadway shows, who cares about those pesky outer boroughs.

PS – In case you didn’t get the memo: SEND SOME FUCKING PLOWS TO BROOKLYN!